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Upgrade your computer's processor: you

By Dave Burdick, The Denver Post

Updated:
12/10/2013 07:34:55 AM EST

(Jeff Neumann/The Denver Post)

After a bitterly cold week, we've all spent a little too much time indoors, likely glued to some screen or another. And that's fine. But as soon as my front door finishes thawing out, I'm going outside.

There's just one problem: I'm probably still going to feel like I have more to do at my computer. The e-mail won't stop piling up, the machine runs sluggishly and even if I weren't looking at it, I'd be getting phantom phone vibrations, worrying that somebody was urgently trying to get in touch with me.

If you're shopping for New Year's Resolutions, here's the second in our $mart consumer-resolution menu: Spend less time focused on electronics by being more efficient.

Ryan Orbuch, 17, seems to use his time wisely. For one thing, the Boulder High School senior designed a to-do list iPhone app called Finish that has been downloaded tens of thousands of times — at 99 cents per download. Finish allows users to input tasks that need doing, along with due dates. Then the app takes over management of those tasks, sorting them into short-, medium- and long-term tasks.

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“You're offloading future thinking that you would otherwise have to do,” Orbuch says. “It's a good payoff.”

Getting to that payoff requires using a system wisely. Orbuch, who says he also likes the immensely popular productivity app Evernote, has this advice for people hoping to spend less time worrying:

“When you have a tool that you can outsource some of your thinking to, actually trust that tool.”

That applies everywhere, not just with Finish. Whatever your method is, it's important to stick to it to get the most out of it.

The idea behind this section isn't to load you up on tech tools and have you spend all of your time using them — the idea is to reduce the amount of time you spend spinning your wheels.

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